In linguistics, subordination (abbreviated variously subord, sbrd, subr or sr) is a complex syntactic construction in which one or more clauses are dependent on the main clause, such as The dog ran home after it had played with the ball. The italicized text is the subordinate clause. The grammatical structure associated with subordination is hypotaxis, or the grammatical arrangement of "unequal" constructs (hypo="beneath", taxis="arrangement".
Dependent clauses are also called "subordinate clauses".
Subordinate clauses are often introduced by a complementizer (e.g. that, if, whether) or a subordinating conjunction (e.g. after, because, while).